10 Unknown Facts About: Philip K. Dick

Ladies and Gentlemen, I love a good read, especially if it involves robots or space or things of that nature, so when I saw that today was Philip K. Dick's birthday, I had to learn more about him. He may be the author of numerous science fiction novels, several of them became movies (Minority Report, Blade Runner, Total Recall, and A Scanner Darkly). but here are a few things you probably didn't know.

10 Unknown Facts about Philip K. Dick:

1. After writing Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep? he decided, in fact, that no, they shouldn't since real people don't dream about real sheep. So he built a robot to have dreams about flying gravy boats like the rest of us.
2. Philip K. Dick's first name was originally spelled Phillip, but the other l was shot off in the war and doctors were unable to reattach it.
3. Philip K. Dick could grow his beard at will, hence its impressive bushiness.
4. Philip K. Dick took on a part-time job as a temporal conduit through which time traveling tourists could experience life in our days by mentally possessing his body from time to time. In return, he was able to visit their times (similar to Quantum Leap). This was often mistaken as mental illness.
5. There have been so many adaptations of Philip K. Dick's books and stories that some scientists believe they spontaneously adapt themselves to film, television, and radio if left unattended for too long.
6. Philip K. Dick was a pastamancer who could summon a plate of spaghetti five times a day.
7. Philip K. Dick knew how to fly an interstellar space shuttle. His greatest sorrow was that they didn't exist yet for him to fly.
8. The K stands for "kick a-- and take names," which made it difficult for him to fill out forms.
9. Philip K. Dick was able to punch through walls no thicker pi inches thick, regardless of what material it was built out of.
10. The scene in Back to the Future where Marty McFly plays the song at the dance and Chuck Barry's cousin calls Chuck and lets him hear it was based on an incident from Philip K. Dick's life (again due to the Temporal Conduit job), except the song was "Stars and Stripes Forever" and John Phillip Souza's cousin Cindy Souza passed the song along.

You have been informed.